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Five Ways You Know That ALDI Fucking Hates You

We only have one major supermarket where I live (the local IGA doesn’t count because they somehow manage to successfully operate from a business model that charges $14.50 for a rotting bag of apples that have been in cold storage since Justin Timberlake was the frontman for N’Sync).

We have Coles. Coles runs their little suburban monopoly like a modern-day feudal system, and could teach the Mafia a thing or two about extortion.

Example:

Within a 12 month period the price per kilo of the regular mince at our Coles went from $5 to $8, a price increase of 60%. I was bemused as the price crept up to $6 and then annoyed as they upped it to $7 shortly afterwards. By the time they’d jacked the price up to $8 per kilo a month or two later I was kind of pissed off.

Down down, the prices are DOWN. Except when they’re UP.

To be fair, they also instituted a twofer “special” where I can now buy two kilos for $14; so instead of paying $5 for mince in my weekly shop I’m now paying $14.

Piss piss, you’re taking the PISS.

So when we were within spitting distance of an ALDI supermarket on the weekend it made a lot of sense to pop in and stock up. It had been ages since I’d done a shop there and I’d forgotten how much they kind of actually hate you (the fact they insist on spelling their name in CAPS like they are SHOUTING AT YOU is a dead giveaway).

Need more examples? Here’s five…

ALDI don’t trust you to use their trolleys without a downpayment

Your first clue that ALDI hates you is right there at the entrance: you need a fucking gold coin to operate their trolleys. This says two things:

1) we don’t believe you are a trustworthy person

2) we don’t care for your convenience, so fuck you

Apparently there is a magical ALDI amulet that enables you to operate their trolleys if you aren’t in the habit of carrying cash, or have small children that mysteriously make all your gold coins disappear. I mean that’s nice and all, but how about you just let people take a fucking trolley without scrounging around for a security deposit.

ALDI don’t respect you enough to implement a coherent store layout

ALDI have pioneered a unique range of visual merchandising techniques to make your shopping experience more bewildering and frustrating than ever before.

It’s like the ALDI CEO sat everyone down in a meeting one day and said:

“First, we make all of our products look identical. Then, we’ll stock the shelves by exploding a shipping container in the middle of the store to ensure there is no logical order or internal consistency to the layout. Every week we will explode new containers of completely pointless products in the centre of the store – we will call these ‘specials’. We expect these will placate frustrated shoppers who are consistently unable to find the staple items they actually need; like the spicy BBQ sauce that is conveniently sandwiched between the fabric softener and coffee pods above a freezer case full of crumbed calamari.”

ALDI are sticklers for their checkout etiquette

Regular ALDI shoppers will know that you HAVE to position your trolley in a very specific way at the end of the checkout. This is non-negotiable. There are no signs, no handy demarcation lines and you have no pre-warning about any of this. It’s inevitable – you are going to look stupid because despite being in your late-30’s you will still need a 16 year old to show you how to park a fucking trolley. Depending on the checkout person and the length of the queue your fumbling ineptness will be met with irritation, agitation or weary condescension. You barely have time to recover from the social awkwardness of all this before the checkout person starts THROWING THINGS at you.

ALDI thinks it’s really funny to throw your groceries at you

Once you’ve met the necessary OH & S requirements of positioning your trolley the checkout person will proceed to scan your items with lightning speed, hurling them at you with a ferocious glee not seen since Brett Lee last took to the pitch. Cans of baked beans, bags of English muffins and whole pineapples suddenly become fast-moving projectiles, and it’s impossible to keep up. To avoid further social embarrassment you’ll wildly throw everything into the trolley and get home later to discover that your bread is squashed, your bananas are smooshed, your eggs have exploded and your ego is bruised. It’s brutal.

ALDI will fuck you up with the lack of free bags every time

You’ve survived the machine gun barrage of fast-moving consumer goods at the checkout – kudos to you! Alright hot stuff, how the fuck are you going to get that trolley load of random shit into your car? You aren’t packing an emergency stash of plastic bags, because why would you? You look around for empty boxes. There are none. Defeated, you trudge to the back of the line behind a frazzled-looking woman with five kids and three overflowing trolleys in order to buy seven 15 cent disposable bags to pack your shopping into. You finally get to the front of the queue, only to realise that you spent your last fucking gold coin unlocking the damn fucking trolley.

BUT….. ALDI will sell you a SHITLOAD of groceries…. CHEAP!

In the end I finally worked out why people subject themselves to this barrage of petty indignities in order to do their weekly food shopping. I purchased a whole trolley full of groceries for $177. My trolley was literally full to the brim. Back at Coles my $177 would have bought me a couple of kilos of mince and half a trolley of basic home-brand staples.

It’s funny, a lot of the commenters are agreeing with you on this one. I think if all of them did it we’d get used to keeping some coins handy and it would just become a habit to have them ready. It’s actually not a bad idea – just one I think I’m not used to!

Consumers in Germany are used to this system, just a learning process.
In Australia is Shopping cart collector a job, look at the guys with the trailers driving around the suburbs and collect for the shopping malls. Nothing wrong with this guys, just a big waste of money, which someone has to pay.
“Australia, get ready and have a coin handy”.

Well of course we should ALL be taking bags with us shopping every time, why not. So much the better if they are jute or cotton. But of course the coin lock on the trolleys is taking the piss and like most people I like finding one or two in the car park and taking them back to the store to do my shopping.

Yeah it’s interesting… One of our major outlets instituted a strict no-plastic policy and quietly revoked it a year later because it was wildly unpopular. Australians definitely need an attitude shift there (me included!)

hahaha crack up as usual 🙂 I am total ALDI convert! We too are subject to the crappy local Coles which is literally the only supermarket for about 20km. They too like the charge ridiculous prices from everything yet stock NOTHING you want! To an ALDO pro like myself, there is totally a plan to the layout of every ALDI, you just need to shop there every week for about a week to work it out. I wish they put an ALDI closer to us, we just shop to or from an outing.

I remember feeling so intimidated the first time I walked in to an Aldi, it was seriously scary, and you get real pro shoppers in there, they aren’t messing around like your wanderers in Coles. Once you figure it out it is awesome, but you do definitely have to be more organised about it all (which is probably not a bad thing, anything that forces me to get my shit together has to be good, right?). The local Coles here is more convenient (undercover parking and no-deposit trolleys) but when you can get twice the stuff for half the cash (and the best frozen lasagnes in the land!), inconvenience wins!

Yeah, I think a lot of my problems with Coles would be solved by more competition, but alas our local council is very anti-development. Which is great – don’t get me wrong – but one extra supermarket would be nice!

Aldi are coming to Adelaide next year and one is opening up right next to my local Coles. Thanks for the heads-up on the self-packing, that will be a challenge . . . but we’ve had no free plastic bags since 2006 so at least I’ll have my reusable ones with me!

You can overcome the trolly issues with a $5 spend on ebay. Search trolley keys. The cost will get you 4 of them and they work a treat for all coin demanding trolleys.

Sadly ALDI don’t believe in free bags – they’d rather have you pay a premium to do their advertising for them. Noticed how the bags carry their brand name and logo? Maybe if they dropped that practice and simply supplied bog standard bags like Coles or Wollies, then they wouldn’t need to charge for them. Too easy I suspect…

Don’t be too quick to pick on the piles of crap down the center of the stores. Without those poor quality tools and break easily brand toys, they’d have little draw to pull customers in!

Sadly the lack of open registers is enough to piss of any gently minded soul. But if that’s not bad enough, I recently visited my local and bought some chicken rissoles. Were they good? Actually yes! So the next week I went back for more, only to be told they were a special item and are not stocked regularly. I straight away went to my local pet shop and bought several chickens. I have made a pen for them and feed them daily. Clearly chickens are in super short supply as a supermarket chain can’t stock products made from them regularly. Luckily for me the pet shops don’t know this yet! Now all I have to do is wait until my chicken stocks (I know) go up in price. Then who’s sitting on top of a foul (I know – sorry) smelling goldmine? I AM!!

Thank you thank you for that tip about the trolley keys!! I’m going to get some and leave them in the cars. And BAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAAHHA to the chickens! LOL this is such a kick-ass comment – thanks for the giggle!

So funny. Every fricken time I go to Aldi I consider crawling over the barricade like a nimble Gollum so I can get to the opposite veggie wall quicker. I never do of course and instead am faced with winding through the masses of people who never took a cart parking class!

I’m an Aussie living in Germany. Been here for 7 years and I kind of forgot what it’s like to NOT bring a shopping bag with me everywhere and a euro coin for the trolley… I guess you do get used to it. This made me laugh though…. I still ask myself every time I shop at ALDI why the product placement is so bloody random and why the space to collect your shopping at the end of the register is sooo small! 😀

In the US, there is no store I despise more than Aldi. Luckily there are many more options available, but here, they are dirty and the products go bad much more quickly than from anywhere else. It’s really not worth what you save.

I always feel defiant when I walk against the grain of the walkways made by the aisles of items and go back towards the entrance for something I forgot. Each Aldi location is different and the smaller the town, the better they seem. But other then that, love Aldi and will be looking into those buggy keys! Thanks for sharing!

I HATE Aldi. Not a big fan of the big supermarkets either. But I buy the Coles or Woolies home/generic brands and find that the quality of these products are quite all right actually. Dare I say on a par with Aldi’s own generic brands?? Because, that’s pretty much what Aldi sells isn’t it – Aldi’s own generic brands?? Or am I tripping. LOL. And the prices are still cheap, I don’t have to go through Aldi’s fascist shopping system and complete and utter rudeness with regard to the lack of shopping bags, zero assistance and no free trolleys. As they say in Vietnam, phuc dat chit!! Hehe kidding. Thanks for the laffs! ;-D

I wish I could shop at Aldi but I just can’t. Not only for all the reasons that you’ve listed (those damned correctly positioned trolley nazis!!) by mostly because they don’t stock the stuff I like to eat. What supermarket doesn’t sell rice noodles ffs. I’ve searched high and low over their poorly arranged, confusing shelving and it is nowhere. And not just my precious rice noodles, there’s loads of other stuff as well. Our local IGA on the other hand is the BEST!! Locally sourced fresh fruit and veg. Reasonably priced and again locally sourced meat. Loads of choice and hard to find international products. Employment for the local kiddies. It may be a tad more expensive but I’d rather give my money to them and support locals than to the evil duopoly that is Coles and Woolworths. Sorry Aldi.

Yeah, I think that the IGAs are all different, and the quality really varies depending on the location and the management. So glad that you guys have a good one out your way – it does feel better to support the local economy where we can. Goodness knows there aren’t many opportunities to do that these days!

Being charged a surcharge to use your credit card. This means I buy less from Aldi, because I’m only going to use the change in my pocket. I refuse to pay for the ‘privilege’ of accessing my own money, and I have a feeling its not actually legal that they do this.